1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications, and is more particularly related to recording transaction data in a telecommunications network.
2. Technical Background
There are many factors driving the move toward converged networks such as deregulation, new sources of competition, substantial growth of the Internet, and the growth and importance of data in customers' enterprise networks. The popularity and convenience of the Internet has resulted in the reinvention of traditional telephony services. IP (Internet Protocol) telephony, which is also referred to as Voice-over-IP (VoIP), involves the conversion of voice information into data packets that are subsequently transmitted over an IP network. IP telephony over the Internet is often offered at minimal, or no cost to the users. Thus, IP telephony has found significant success, particularly in the long distance market.
Users also have turned to IP telephony as a matter of convenience. Both voice and data services are often accessible through a single piece of equipment, e.g., the personal computer. Furthermore, traditional DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) phones can enjoy the benefits of VoIP technology through the use of network adapters. The continual integration of voice and data services further fuels this demand for IP telephony applications.
The primary incentives for customers to adopt a converged solution are cost and the promise of new and expanded capabilities. However, if IP telephony is to be fully accepted in the marketplace, VoIP must be interoperable with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and have a comparable Quality of Service (QoS). Therefore, to ensure the highest success rate with the customers, the service providers need to build a network that provides call quality, service reliability, and security that is at minimum, on par with the PSTN. It is essential that IP Telephony solutions meet customer demands of high-quality, ease of use, superior customer service, and lower cost. Since the public Internet can only provide “best-efforts”service, managed IP networks are required to support VoIP traffic with the call quality, service reliability, and security that users are accustomed to.
One approach that is being considered in providing VoIP with the call quality, service reliability, and security that users are accustomed to, involves the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP is an application-layer signaling protocol that has been developed to create, modify, and terminate sessions with one or more users. These sessions include Internet telephone calls, multi-media conferences, and multi-media distribution. SIP functionality is typically resident on application servers. Sip servers are configured to provide telephony services, and process call event information. Because vendors have developed their own custom SIP application programs, call events and telephony services are processed by each vendor's application server in a proprietary way. Unfortunately, when a network includes network elements provided by a multiplicity of vendors, it becomes necessary to accommodate a variety of proprietary interfaces that enable the devices to transmit and receive network transaction data. By way of example, transaction data may include call event information, billing information, monitoring information, error data, fraud prevention data, timeout data and any other data that must be tracked by the network.
What is needed is a platform independent method for capturing transaction data in a uniform manner. Preferably, the system and method will be extensible, providing embedded information that will enable a receiving computer to read the generic, uniformly formatted records without needing to accommodate any proprietary interface.